What's happened to the used high end market recently?? Sales are tough....:0(

All the reasons above leads one to the conclusion that the prices are too high for the current state of the market.

A) the economy sucks for most people except the rich
B) the rich are more interested in fads, like Sono, Bose, etc
C) there's way too much HEA out there already
D) the few younger, poorer audiophiles (like myself) are having a great time exploring vintage audio.  Why spend $1000s when $100s on craigslist can get you an incredible system?

advance in music format such as streaming have some part of the issue.
Why pay for a fiscal format if you can stream it with a nice DAC you will have very similar effect.
This affects the front end of the equation.
The Younger audience is not interested in HEA, because they mostly were not exposed to it. 

@akaim8 you really make an excellent case.

I'll extend your position by mentioning Amazon Alexa.  My sister's family and my best friend's fall into my demographic, mid-late 40s.  Neither has an audio rig, though my buddy put together an Onkyo based system in the early 90s that one could argue represented HEA at the time, albeit at the lower end.  Both families really love music, so it's not for lack of interest.  Both now have Alexa in their home, with speakers across several rooms.  Whenever I'm at their homes, most of the time music is playing, preceded by, "Alexa, play me Steve Earle's best songs."  I can't tell you how many other people I hear talking about using Alexa in the same way

Since he's joined the site recently, Michael Green brought tremendous insight and refreshing perspective. Obviously, no one served on the front lines more than Michael, and so many of us took cues from him over the years to improve our systems. He often makes the point here of the high-end audio business taking a turn in the mid-late 90s, and falling into decline since.

I perceived that same shift myself at the time. And since...

The manifestation of that fall is something that always struck me as being off-kilter, but sounds logical to so many that my trying to refute it over the years normally fails to resonate with folks. It goes like this...a dealer or manufacturer states it takes just as much effort to sell a $100 item as a $1000 item. So, in the vein of working smarter, not harder, I focus on customers interested in the $1000 item, as opposed to the $100 item, as I'm working 10X less. Seems reasonable and smart, yes?

We normally bypass the disproportion of that, in that the $1000 pie is far smaller than 10X than the $100 pie. Anyway, that's the way the market, and we now need to multiply these $100 / $1000 numbers by an order or two of magnitude to represent the current state we all lament for the sadness and smallness of the market / business / hobby. Combine this path of pricing with the backfill of lower cost HEA components with tweaks that strike most outside the hobby and many inside as sounding both ridiculous and impossible, and should any of us feel surprised how this morphed into a lunatic fringe of the lunatic fringe?

I'll contrast what high-end audio has become with an article I read in the late 90s about a guy who blasted on the scene, creating a fortune running a bank modeled after McDonald's and The Home Depot, instead of the normal bank and Post Office. It was all about low cost and convenience to the customer. The bank stayed open in the evening and on the weekends, including Sunday. Regardless of what you think of McDonald's food and service, or this banker as a person, his analysis into the success behind McDonald's struck me as brilliant. Again, he made an absolute fortune, though impropriety caused the powers that be find a suitable bank to take over, aka TD Bank. I think we can find a similar pattern and important lessons to learn in not a lot of $20K tube amplifiers getting sold, but certain companies dealing out more fuses at $100 a pop than we could have believed a few years ago